Google Reader

In two-and-a-half months, Google Reader will be going away. This will affect at least seventeen of us, if subscriber stats for Just Enough Craig are any indication.

Google Reader's shutdown is disheartening. I've been a happy user of the service ever since a former employer of mine implemented draconian web filtering on its employees. The web filtering stopped just about everything on the Web from getting through, including a lot of useful technical sites, but it strangely allowed Google Reader to get through. Eventually the web filtering went away, but not before my Web-reading habits changed so as to ignore just about everything online that doesn't have an RSS feed. Now Google Reader is going away. What to do?

For now, I've moved all my feeds in my Google account to Thunderbird, which is the email program maintained by the Mozilla people, who are the same people who make Firefox. Say what you want about Google and how they frequently shut down or make worse their free services; at least they allow you to get your data and go somewhere else. Anyway, Thunderbird works well for the time being because I do all my Web reading on one computer. However, Thunderbird doesn't scale to using multiple computers—such as, say, a home computer and a work computer—because it keeps track of which articles I've read and which I haven't in a local database. Multiple computers will each keep their own database, and the databases will be out of sync. Synchronicity was Google Reader's main strength: it was in the Cloud and thus accessible and up-to-date on every device with a modern web browser. In order to synchronize Thunderbird, I might revert to a thumb drive and Sneaker Net. Or maybe some other company will try to make money by providing a similar free Reader service? By the way, who pays for the Internet?